Deep Democracy, Lewis Method

Deep Democracy is a practical (facilitation) method to start dialogue together. It actively looks for the wisdom of the minority. Alternative points of views are heard, explored and brought into the decision-making process. This results in widely supported decisions and optimal use of the potential of the group. This new view on decision-making and group dynamics enables co-creation.

What do you learn in this training?During the two day Level 1 training you will learn the basics of Deep Democracy. Next to that, you will learn practical methods that you can directly apply in your own work or private situation. The focus is on recognising the voice of the minority and how you can add this wisdom to the decision of the majority. You learn to deal with the rational and emotional aspects of decision-making. There is also plenty of space to practice during the training. You learn to:

Follow group dynamics and to target your interventions

Look at groups in a different way

Work with tensions and conflicts in groups

Take decisions that are 100% supported

Realise transformations in groups

Strengthen relations in groups.

Content Level 1The programme is not fixed and will be decided upon by the group through Deep Democracy. In this way, you immediately experience the method concerning small decisions. Elements of the programme are:

­Facilitating check-in and check-out process

Recognising terrorist line behaviour in the group

Role theory (fundamentally different way of looking at a group)

Applying the 5 steps of Deep Democracy; an approach to surface all alternative opinions and perspectives and take them along in decision-making

Specific methods such as ‘Soft shoe shuffle’ and ‘The Argument’

Increasing awareness about the roles you take up in a group

Your own neutrality in a group and the impact of it.

The study load is 16 hours. After finishing this course participants will receive an official Deep Democracy Level 1 certificate, as well as access to Deep Democracy Level 2 and to the online Deep Democracy community.

Sprockler Training

Sprockler is a response to an increasingly complex world in which we endeavor to make sense of what happens. It uses a unique combination of qualitative (stories) and quantitative (numbers) data. It bridges the worlds of subjectivity – stories – and objectivity – numbers.

With Sprockler you can create story-based inquiries to collect actual experiences. This generates meaningful data that contributes to the learning capacities of your organization, company or community.

People have valuable experiences to share

People are often treated as passive sources of information rather than active sources of inspiration. This happens in monitoring and evaluation, knowledge management and strategic planning. How many boring, inadequate, or misplaced questionnaires have you received? It is easy to ask people what they think, but they will not tell you a lot if they are not convinced that the issues they raise will be addressed. People have valuable experiences to share if we can only engage and inspire them.

This training is for you if you:

Are using stories to understand what is going on and look for ways to make more of it.

Have the aspiration to use stories to do research, but have no idea where to start.

Need to measure the impact of your work, but are fed up with standard data collection.

Want to explore new features and enjoy the full potential of Sprockler.

This practical training will help you to:

Understand in which situation Sprockler can be best used

Use the Sprockler tools, including the designer, app and online collector and the visualizer

Be introduced to the art of asking the right questions for Sprockler

Be introduced to inspiring non-extractive ways of collecting your stories

Understand the practicalities of Sprockler, including the support of different languages, devices.

Your trainers Han Rakels, Lisette Gast and Anne van Marwijk are experienced Sprockler practitioners and have extended experience in a broad variety of face-to-face dialogue methods that inspired the development of Sprockler.

One-day group training

Introduction to the principles and development of the philosophy and approach and link to other approaches, methods and tools

Understanding the application, illustrated with inspiring cases from several sectors

Find out more about a recent example where Sprockler was used and listen to DM&E Thursday Talk by Stine Chen (Oxfam Novib), Nele Blommestein (Sprockler) & Lisette Gast about how Oxfam Novib, Saferworld and partners used Sprockler to conduct a baseline measurement for their project on access to fair, legitimate and effective Justice in Pakistan.

Navigating Complexity

Do you want to achieve results together, but do you face a lot of effort, resistance and / or energy?

Does the word ‘complex’ often fall when it comes to your project, challenge or your cooperation?

Do you have the idea that you do not understand each other enough?

Do you feel that you do not have the right (process) tools?

Would you like to learn more in the field of facilitation, co-creation and / or collaboration?

Do you feel that complexity offers a wealth of opportunities, if only you knew how to tab them?

In these turbulent times understanding complexity means, looking at the world through different eyes. Experiencing a world full of possibilities and how to take advantage of them. Learn how to navigate your complex issue, challenge or environment …

Work together with more cohesion, ease, results and energy.

What are we going to do?

We will introduce you to what is going on with (increasing) complexity and what that means for leadership, behavior, cooperation and organization in our society – and in organizations, in governments, and in partnerships. You will be introduced to the Cynefin framework on complexity and you will practice with it. We will work with the 9 ‘Complexity Navigator’ building blocks, to realize breakthroughs and results in complex issues. We bring in case studies as examples and participants will work with their own (work-)situations.

Results

After this training, you will:

Know what ‘complexity’ is and why it is not the same as ‘complicated’

Understand why projectplans do not work in complex environments

Recognize constructive and destructive behavior in complexity

Have insight into how you can navigate in complexity

Experience the power of dialogue and how dialogue can lead to joint efforts/results

Get an idea of suitable methods and tools

Experience different interactive that move people

Receive new insights so you will find new perspectives for action. You will be able to give (more) guidance in complexity.

LEGO Serious Play

Are you looking for a way to get everyone involved? A way in which everyone can speak out about what is important to them, with colleagues but also across teams, departments or even throughout the whole organisation?

But do you find that you cannot really do that in ‘traditional’ meeting set-ups? Are you finding yourself too often stuck in tiring, boring and repetitive discussion? Or have you tried some methods but were not able to produce satisfying results with the group?

It is possible with LEGO Serious Play.

LEGO Serious Play stimulates action, creativity and reflection. It helps you and your team to look, reflect, listen and learn in a collaborative fashion. It is a proven method that is fun and impactful and turns ‘heavy’ themes into light ones.

Perspectivity is facilitating three short LEGO Serious Play training sessions in the upcoming months for people who are curious to learn more about the technique and how to use it themselves. In this training, we will show you the effects and applications of this 100% interactive work form. You will immediately find out why this is so much fun, which will make you want to work with it immediately.

About the trainer

Anna takes LEGO Serious Play wherever she comes. Whether it is in start-ups, NGOs or larger government organizations, LEGO always makes every group of people smile and let them build, experience and play constructively with ideas and challenges. The result: more coherence, energy and inspired action in what you do together.

Designing Dialogue Processes

How do you conduct a constructive dialogue with a large group? How do you organize the process – and the room – in such a way that attendees engage in a valuable conversation?

Expert facilitation on the spot is half the work. The other half: careful design and use of appropriate methods that meet the situation at hand.

Dialogue in complexity

The world is becoming increasingly complex. There are many issues that we can no longer resolve by ourselves, within our department or organization. We need the wisdom of those involved to understand what is going on and to come to new insights.

The debate is often not the right form. The focus on being right, hardens viewpoints and often drives parties even further apart. The dialogue is much more suitable to bring different perspectives together.

Very special to experience how participants took an open attitude from the very start.

In a constructive dialogue, you search for the whole and the connection between the parts, instead of dividing an issue into pieces. You question assumptions instead of defending them. You learn by discovering together instead of persuading and selling. You look for shared meaning, instead of consensus on a component.

Two-day in-company

In this two-day training ‘designing dialogue processes’ you learn the why, how and what of a constructive dialogue. The training offers you the basics to design large scale dialogue processes in complex settings. The training is intended for those who need to bring diverse stakeholders in complex situations together to achieve innovative breakthroughs.

The training is well-suited for managers, internal facilitators, organization and communication professionals who want to engage in (large scale) dialogues with internal and external stakeholders.

At the end of the training participants have a shared image and knowledge of:

The value of dialogue for socially complex situations

Building blocks to create common ground and mutually reinforcing actions with large groups of diverse stakeholders

When to use dialogue effectively, and when it is not appropriate

Principles of designing dialogue processes

A number of different work forms and possible applications

Shared image and knowledge of rules and facilitating techniques to conduct a constructive dialogue.

Dialogue methods for large groups, such as Open Space, Dialogue Circle, Future Search, Appreciative Inquiry, World Café, etc.

Various dialogue methods are applied during the training to experience different approaches.

Depending on your organisational needs and the duration of the training (between one and two days), we can pick one or two actual topics that play within your organization. This way the participants themselves experience the rules, steps and levels of listening and get a shared experience to reflect on together during and after the training.

Stories of change

Stories of change are a great way to communicate the value and progress of a project in an accessible way.

Explore and demonstrate change

Stories of change are used to explore and demonstrate change that happens during an academic or field research project or programme. They allow the researcher to supplement quantitative indicators with qualitative information about changes in knowledge, behaviour, attitudes, practice and policies. Information that cannot easily be captured in quantitative metrics.

Bring your project to life and induce adaptive learning

Stories of change bring your project to life. Especially for outside audiences, such as external stakeholders, politicians, project financiers and the general public. Stories of change focus on small changes, showing little steps towards impact. This often leads to a wider understanding of the overall results or potential future results.

Storytelling is an art, not a science.

Stories of change induce adaptive learning within the system. They can be used to illustrate the Theory of Change (ToC) and allow stakeholders to investigate and reflect on factors that have enabled or constrained the change to occur (or not). These can be intended and unintended and may reveal important lessons about underlying assumptions. The insights are captured in a story.

Theory and writing

The Stories of change training programme teaches academic and field researchers how to develop and present their stories of change. The training encourages them to identity small changes with potentially big impact and helps them to turn these into appealing stories that bring their research to life.

Programme

One-day group training

Get into the storytelling mode

Storytelling: the human nature

Getting to the essence of your story

Scripting your story in three steps:

Brain writing

Free writing

Script writing

Writing tips

Publishing formats: blog, podcast, article, infographic

Follow-up: Individual written exercise to elaborate a story of change on a current project. With individual follow-up coaching, feedback and group reflection.

The positive feedback helped me to get rid of my insecurity about my writing.

In-company training

Number of participants: Between 8 and 32

Period: 1-day group training followed by individual coaching and feedback (4 hours p/p)

CoResolve: Participatory Leadership Training

This2 -day training course is for anyone that struggles with the balancingact of driving an agenda and believing in participation and inclusion. The course provides you with the knowledge and skills you need to do so successfully.

Are you driving a process to achieve your goal with the group you are leading or advising?

Do you believe in the need of participation of all – including that odd voice?

Are you looking for a way to harness the energy arising from conflict and turn it into fuel for productive group processes?

Then this CoResolve training is made for you!

BASIC TRAINING – 2 DAY PROGRAM

The 2-day program consists of:

12 hours training – The training comprises of 5 learning modules and is based on the Lewis Method of Deep Democracy. It covers background, theoretical understanding, diagnostics, detailed steps and experiential learning.

4 hours follow up – The follow up enables participants to practice and refresh the tools during the session and provide a platform where people can address and discuss issues subsequent to the initial training.

The modules provide you with the knowledge and skills to:

Deal with resistance

Make collaborative decisions

Understand relationships and group dynamics

Resolve tension.

In addition, the basic training module of the CoResolve Participative Leadership Program offers a custom-designed web-based platform supporting this program. The platform allows participants access to the learning material, exercises, discussion groups and the ability to connect to other participants internationally.

WHO SHOULD PARTICIPATE?

Leadership is a broad word and can be applied in different contexts. In the CoResolve Participative Leadership Program, a leader is identified as anyone driving a process to achieve an objective. Whether you are an executive, processional, manager, teacher, consultant, community worker or a student leading a project or driving a process, you gain from this program.

Most leaders are employed to drive strategy and gain results and should be spending 90% of their time on these outputs. In reality, however, most leaders spend their time trying to resolve people issues and dynamics. Usually these issues are neither rational nor logical. Furthermore, they don’t respond well to logical thinking processes and resolution tools. When leaders apply these logical tools the issues are more likely to cycle repeatedly, wasting valuable time.

The CoResolve Participative Leadership Program specifically focuses on this area. Participants are taught process driven theoretical principles and tools which equip participants to deal with the irrational human element in business. The program is experiential, enabling participants to gain confidence by applying the tools through practice.

Agile Communication

The world is moving. Changes follow each other more and more quickly and are simultaneously influenced by many actors and factors. It is an illusion to think that you can continue to orchestrate the communication centrally. After all, communication takes place continuously, everywhere and by everyone and with constantly changing character, actors and needs.

How do you organise communication in an ever-changing environment? This requires an agile attitude. With a flexible attitude we can respond much better to change. That may seem simple, but requires a substantially different way of working.Scrum is an innovative method to deal with this. Developed in IT, but now also widely used outside. Scrum works in short cycles – with fixed roles, recurring meetings and useful lists – which also help the Communication department to become agile.

With a flexible attitude we can respond much better to change. That may seem simple, but requires a substantially different way of working.

Training
In the in-company Agile Communication training for communication teams, you learn what agile scrum has to offer you as communication professionals. Why the long-term plan no longer works and you are better off focusing on short-term results. How you can deliver value in short cycles. How you can involve your client and your stakeholders more closely. And how you can work together with more fun and be more productive.

This training offers a mix of experiential exercises, reflection, theory and practical examples. During the training we will work with your own projects, so that you can apply the lessons learned immediately in practice.

After this training you know:

What agile communication is and why you need it

How to organise your projects agile

How to achieve results that really matter

What the conditions are to make agile work

How you can introduce agile methods in your organisation

For whom?
The training is intended for communication managers and professionals who are looking for practical tools to be able to deal with change flexibly.

TrainerPetra de Boer from Perspectivity, experienced communication professional and proces facilitator. Petra is co-author of Scrum in action, the first Dutch handbook for Scrum outside of IT (Business Contact, June 2015).

Open Training
In addition to the in-company training, you can also register individually for the two-day Master Class: Agile & Scrum for the CommProf. Trainers: Betteke van Ruler, emeritus professor of communication science and author and founder of the Reflective Communication Scrum (Adfogroep) and Petra de Boer. The study load is 16 hours.

Agile Scrum & Project Start-Up

Scrum is a smart and agile project methodology to achieve fast and tangible results with compact project teams. Scrum has been applied in IT for many years and is rapidly gaining popularity in other fields.

Tailor-made

The Agile Scrum training by Perspectivity provides of mix of practical exercises, theoretical knowledge and examples from the field. The training is tailor-made to suit the specific needs of your organisation.

Training objectives

In this hands-on training you will learn what Scrum is, how it works and how to introduce it in your organisation. At the end of the training, participants:

Know what agile is and why you need to get agile

Understand and practiced the basic Scrum principles

Learn the basic conditions for a successful Scrum

Are inspired to start scrumming their projects

More info

The training takes anywhere from half a day up to two days and can be given at your company or any other location. The study load is 4 to 16 hours. Your trainer is Petra de Boer, experienced proces facilitator and scrum coach. She is co-author of Scum in actie, the Dutch handbook for Scrum outside IT.